Programmer Musings

Review of Beautiful Code

Beautiful Code
Edited by Andy Oram & Greg Wilson
O'Reilly, 2007

Although I was really looking forward to reading Beautiful Code when I first heard it was coming out, I found myself a bit disappointed by the reality of the book.

Each chapter is written by a different master coders, giving their views on what makes code beautiful. Some of the essays did a very good job of explaining things that I agree are critical to beautiful code: readability, succinctness, clarity, etc. Other essays discussed qualities that I would not have called beautiful. Some of these included qualities from some of the ugliest code I have ever worked on. The fact that I agreed strongly with some chapters and disagreed just as strongly with others made the book hard to read at first.

Eventually, I realized that this was just another case of beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The qualities that each author praised simplified their lives in the context of the problems that they were solving. In that context, the code was beautiful. In another context, those same qualities would not be as good.

Although I disagreed with some of the authors, I think the overall message was a good one. Some authors praised relatively universal qualities. Others praised particular architectures as making a huge difference in the code. But, all of the authors provided some insight into what different professional programmers see when they look at code. The differences in viewpoints are probably as important as the individual essays.

Overall, I would recommend this book for strong intermediate to senior software developers. I think a junior programmer might not have enough experience to be able to recognize the difference between generally good qualities and qualities that are good in a particular context. Even for the intermediate to strong programmers, I would warn that some of the chapters are definitely harder going than others.

I really don't think this book is for everyone. If you are more interested in learning libraries in your language of choice for solving today's problems, this book won't be of any use. If you have work on enough projects, in enough languages, to really understand that the one, true way to develop software is a myth, then the various viewpoints in this book will help you think about what code beautiful to you.